Briel Computers support forum

I know the Replica 1 Plus is no longer being produced but I found the project very interesting and spent some time examining the schematics and firmware. While most things seem easy to understand there are a few things I’m confused about. I was hoping there were some people still around that may be...

A little while ago, Willem Aandewiel contacted me. He originally owned a KIM-1 in 1976 or so, and he probably forgot more things about the KIM-1 than I ever knew :) He got a MicroKim and eventually made it work after he had some initial trouble with what seemed like a lazy 6502. And then he decided ...

Thanks for posting!

I like these tutorials and I follow them on your web page whenever you post an update on Google Plus. This forum doesn't get many visitors anymore so don't let that deter you from writing future tutorials.

===Jac

My best guess is to leave the washer with the tab off, and put the lock washer and the nut on the outside. If there's not enough thread, just put the nut only, or leave that off too. Those parts are really intended for when the switch is mounted onto a front panel and isn't attached to anything else...

I have one of those too, I bought one when I was on a business trip for two weeks and the L-Star project that I had taken with me, stopped working. If you take the WDC65C02 off the Replica 1, you can build your own L-Star on those breadboards. See https://hackaday.io/project/3620/gallery#835a8e334ce...

The examples you name are definitely possible and not too hard. Keep in mind that the Apple 1 was designed as a minimal 6502 computer (CPU, ROM, RAM, PIA) connected to what's really a video terminal. The original was of course black and white, and supported only scrolling and line feed, but since al...

Hey this could be fun. I don't know much about this "AppleSoft" thing but I'll learn. I was able to run the "applesoft-r1.bin" and "applesoft-lite-0.4.bin" images on my L-Star project (https://hackaday.io/project/3620) but only on the L-Star Plus version which has an SR...

According to the CFFA1 home page , it has an 8K EEPROM that holds the firmware, and that EEPROM is mapped at $9000-$AFFF. According to the CFFA1 manual, it has its own address decoder, it doesn't use the Replica 1 address decoder. It can't, because the $9000 output of the address decoder on the Repl...

FYI, I added software to my KimStar project (really KimStar is a subproject of L-Star) that sets up a Propeller QuickStart board as a 24KB RAM expansion with Microsoft Basic ("KB9") preloaded at $2000. It sure is nice to just start my MicroKim and be able to immediately do "4056 <spac...

The on-board ROM doesn't contain the CFFA1 firmware. It's only enabled for addresses $E000-$FFFF as you already concluded from the schematic. I didn't look at the CFFA1 or cassette port schematics but it's pretty obvious that they must be using the $A000, $B000 and/or $C000 pins on the expansion con...

Unfortunately the terminal emulation in the Pocketerm could use a lot of improvement. Basically, don't expect anything to work besides the basic cursor control commands. I use my Pocketerm pretty much only in situations where I don't need full-screen editing (i.e. basically everything that was desig...

Have you tried installing two 10K resistors between the keyboard data/clock pins and VCC? This should fix most PS/2 keyboard problems. Vince forgot to put them in the schematic.

===Jac

I guess my question is answered here: http://sdmakerfaire.org/2015-exhibitors/ Vince is on the list! I hope he'll show up; I'll definitely say "hi" if I can make it. My family has some conflicting obligations this weekend but maybe we can work around those. I probably won't know until tomo...

I don't suppose Briel Computers will be at the San Diego Maker Faire (Oct 3-4 2015), otherwise we would have heard from Vince by now, right?

===Jac

While Vince and I were working on the Superboard, I had some ideas about changing the address decoder so that it would be possible for the Propeller on the board to decode the memory areas that would normally be taken up by the floppy controller. In theory it would have been possible to let the Prop...